The first section of the act originally read as follows: "For the purpose of regulating interstate and foreign commerce in communication by wire and radio so as to make available, so far as possible to all the people of the United States a rapid, efficient, Nation-wide, and world-wide wire and radio communication service with adequate facilities at reasonable charges, for the purpose of the national defense, for the purpose of promoting safety of life and property through the use of wire and radio communication, and for the purpose of securing a more effective execution of this policy by centralizing authority heretofore granted by law to several agencies and by granting additional authority with respect to interstate and foreign commerce in wire and radio communication, there is hereby created a commission to be known as the Federal Communications Commission, which shall be constituted as hereinafter provided, and which shall execute and enforce the provisions of this Act.

In 1933, President Franklin D. Roosevelt asked Daniel C. Roper, Secretary of Commerce, to appoint an interdepartmental committee for studying electronic communications.

A recommendation was made for the establishment of a new agency that would regulate all interstate and foreign communication by wire and radio, telegraphy, telephone and broadcast.

On February 26, 1934, the President sent a special message to Congress urging the creation of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC).

The following day Senator Clarence Dill and Representative Sam Rayburn introduced bills to carry out this recommendation.

Twenty years earlier, in 1914, the U.S. Supreme Court had set limits on price discrimination that were effectively interstate commerce in Houston, East & West Texas Railway Co. v. United States.

The act did not, however, allow for price regulation through the FCC due to strong lobbying efforts from the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners (NARUC).

[7] There has been public debate about the need for an Internet kill switch, defined in a proposed Protecting Cyberspace as a National Asset Act.

The act forbids foreign individuals, governments, and corporations owning more than 20% of the capital stock of a broadcast, common carrier, or radio station.

In 1982, Congress produced a report recommending changes called "Proposals for Revision of the Communications Act of 1934: Telecommunications Issues".

Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover played a large role regarding regulation because he issued the licenses which allocated the spectrum.

Once radio broadcasting became popular, Hoover brought attention to the limited amount of frequency space the spectrum held.

Between 1923 and 1924, Hoover expanded the number of assigned frequencies to reduce the interference, but his quick fix failed, which, in turn, ended self-regulation of spectrum space.

The FRC had a short, 6-year term in American history and transferred its responsibility, as the agency for managing the radio spectrum, to the FCC after the Communications Act of 1934.

Academic Colin Agur argues that the Communications Act of 1934 "filled a legal void" by creating a process through which telephone carrier companies could record and report illegal wiretapping requests and the FCC could punish law enforcement officials who abused wiretapping surveillance.

[15] The FCC took over regulation in 1934 and changed many of the structural characteristics of the original agency, although its goal of reducing interference remained the same.

[23] Because of these effects, the FCC designed the Communications Act 1996 "to provide for a pro-competitive, de-regulatory national policy framework designed to accelerate rapidly private sector deployment of advanced information technologies and services to all Americans by opening all telecommunications markets to competition..."[24] The Telecommunication Act of 1996 also added and changed some rules to account for the emerging internet.

In this section the code states that the FCC is to "encourage the deployment on a reasonable and timely basis of advanced telecommunications capability to all Americans.

The Federal Communications Commission reported back, saying that commercial stations had ample time for educational and other public service programs.

The opinion of the Supreme Court was not unanimous and it led to a conflict with an earlier decision in Federal Communications Commission v. Sanders Brothers Radio Station, 309 U.S. 470, on March 25, 1940.

In that case the FCC interpreted Supreme Court decisions concerning broadcasting to mean that potential economic injury to an existing licensee was not grounds for refusing to license a competitor.

As a result of this 1943 decision, NBC was forced to sell one of its two networks—the Blue Network—and it was this action which then led to the creation of the American Broadcasting Company.